In response to the ever adorably frank Matt Haig who has blogged on the 10 reasons not to be a writer in his Book Trust column.

1   You can go to work in your pyjamas
2  When you don't want to do something you always have the perfect excuse: 'deadline,               sorry!' – to be said with an apologetic smile and hands held frankly open.
3   You can work anywhere in the world
4   People think you're much cleverer than you are
5   Almost everything is 'research,' therefore tax deductible 
6   You can have a bath in the middle of the working day – for inspiration of course
7   Ditto: a walk
8   Your children can tell their friends they have a parent who's an author
9   You get to meet lots of other writers, all of them interesting
10 When you fill in forms, in the occupation box you can put 'writer.' It has a satisfying ring to it.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee for thy depth and breadth and scope,
For chemical elements and common allotropes,
For thy hundred ways of describing grace.
I love thee as the answer to everyday's 
most desperate need, to find perfect verbs.
I love thee for sounds: plops, ticks, clinks, whirrs.
I love thee purely for exalt, extol, praise.
I love thee for creatures' collective terms;
For a skulk of foxes and bears: a sleuth.
I love thee for phobias listed by names,
For eternal verities: the true and the truth,
For the right and the flawless, the flicks and the flames
I shall love thee ever, for thou art my proof. 

                                                                (with apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning)

You may have gathered that I love this thesaurus. If you have a lust for language then buy it and indulge in it – it is a truly matchless tome. 

Trimalchio in West Egg doesn't quite have the ring of The Great Gatsby but it was famously one of the titles Fitzgerald might have given his book. The history of the novel is littered with almost ran titles: Austen's Pride and Prejudice started life as First Impressions and Portnoy's Complaint could have been called, believe it or not, The Jewboy, Wacking off and perhaps the most puzzling example is that War and Peace was initially released under the title All's Well The Ends Well. I wonder if any of these books had been named otherwise, it would have made any difference to their success – would we be anticipating the release of Baz Luhrman's Trimalchio? 

Is naming a book so different from naming a child? If a nephew or niece is named something you find execrable, the name eventually becomes so inextricably tied up with the person it is given to, that you lose sight of your initial opinion. Perhaps this is the same with books – once you get to know and love them that title you thought was a little odd becomes commonplace. A child's name though is not simply a matter of taste; it can signify many things: class, religion, era, nationality, family and this is the case with books too. Titles, as much as covers, classify books: anything with the word wedding must be 'chick lit'; Queen and you're firmly in 'historical fiction' territory; blood and it's likely to be 'crime' and anything deceptively simple is probably 'literary' and layered with hidden metaphor, the same goes for anything overly complicated.

With my first novel (or the first to be published) Queen's Gambit, it had always and only ever been called Poison Bed. That title, for me, was woven into the novel's themes but my agent thought it suggested 'crime' so Queen's Gambit, which had once been a discarded chapter heading, was dusted off. Now I can't imagine it being called anything else. It is a bit like my daughter who I'd wanted to call Stella but her French father said in his charming gallic accented English 'I will not have my daughter named after a beer,' and so she became Alice, a name I liked a lot but not as much as Stella. 

The thing is with a novel, it's not just two of you who have to concur, there are many others and they will not always agree with either you or each other: the sales department might hate what the editorial department loves, and the author might find it hard to be heard over the din. I am trying to name a novel at the moment, which had been lovingly named Lady Crookback in progress, a name I always knew wouldn't ultimately pass muster.  Then out of an anguished process of to-ing and fro-ing a title was decided upon, generally agreed and the wheels began to turn on appropriate covers and so on. But then I began to waver and suggested something new, causing some wailing and gnashing of teeth. 'But it's your book,' I hear you say. 'Can't you name it what you like?' I could, yes, but I'd be a fool not to listen to the combined experience of all the clever people at my publishers who have been successfully flogging books for years. I'm sure though, that whatever it ends up being called, by the time it's on the shelves it will suit its name perfectly.

Which do you prefer: House of Queens or Queen Jane's Shadow?


Refs for booktitles: Emily Temple in Flavorwire

I had my first one star review on Amazon yesterday. It's a rite of passage for every author and part of me wanted to wear it like a badge of honour. I was going to Tweet: MY FIRST ONE STAR REVIEW – NOW I'M A PROPER AUTHOR. But the other part of me was full of self-loathing , flagellating myself for not being good enough and insisting to myself that the 35 readers who have given QUEEN'S GAMBIT five-stars must be wrong. Matt Haig in his latest Book Trust blog, the thin-skinned writer, describes it as the hair in the peanut butter that makes you want to throw out the whole jar. So what is it that makes us novelists so sensitive?

Perhaps we simply spend too much time alone in an imaginary world, populated by characters of our own invention and that leads to a skewed perspective. Haig puts it down to the author needing to feel things intensely in order to convey an emotional truth through writing, which is probably true too. Writing fiction can be like undressing in public. It's personal and intimate – that's what makes readers engage, so when someone doesn't like your book it feels like a rejection of yourself rather than the work. It may be a generalisation but novelists as a breed are probably more introverted by nature (it's the temperament that makes it easier to be alone long enough to write whole novels) and consequently more thin-skinned than many. But I don't think it is just the writer who is sensitive to damning criticism, I think it's everybody. It's just that in the real world people who hardly know you don't tell you what they really think. If they did society would go completely awry. 

Reviews however, are an important platform for the truth and by publishing something we are inviting opinion, indeed opinion is an essential part of the process. Readers need to know what other people honestly think before they buy, and book buyers aren't blind to the fact that such opinions are subjective – to buy a novel and not enjoy it is not the same thing as a buying a faulty toaster. I find it helps to look at the reviews of really successful authors – yes, they get single stars too – and remind myself that no one is everyone's cup of tea.